The Electronic Frontier Foundation, as it so often does, has again stuck its nose in a beehive of controversy. The angry buzz this time is coming from the Motion Picture Association of America, which paid $15,000 to buy the confidential e-mails of peer-to-peer operator TorrentSpy.

That, in itself, is not illegal. Sleazy, perhaps, but not against the law. The MPAA, after all, is engaged in a holy war against P2P companies like TorrentSpy that allow users to download entire movies, sometimes legally and sometimes not. How the TorrentSpy e-mails landed in the MPAA's hands, however, is very much a question of legality.

The e-mails were obtained from disgruntled former TorrentSpy associate Rob Anderson, who hacked into the company's e-mail server and configured it to copy and forward all incoming and outgoing e-mail to his personal Google account. The MPAA justified this behavior by claiming that the hacker did not violate TorrentSpy's privacy, at least not technically.

Surprisingly, a district court agreed with the MPAA. Because the e-mails were stored on TorrentSpy's e-mail server for several milliseconds during transmission, the court ruled, they were not "intercepted" and the result was not a violation of the Federal Wiretap Act. This sort of muddled thinking dangerously undermines the statutory and constitutional privacy rights of every Internet user.

Not surprisingly, TorrentSpy has appealed the decision, and the EFF has filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of TorrentSpy.

"The district court's decision, if upheld, would have dangerous repercussions far beyond this single case," said Kevin Bankston, EFF's senior staff attorney. "That court opinion -- holding that the secret and unauthorized copying and forwarding of e-mails while they pass through an e-mail server is not an illegal interception of those e-mails -- threatens to wholly eviscerate federal privacy protections against Internet wiretapping."

More chillingly, Bankston noted, if the decision is allowed to stand, it will "authorize the government to conduct similar e-mail surveillance without getting a wiretapping order from a judge." There's enough of that already.

The 1968 Wiretap Act defines "intercept" as "the aural or other acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical or other device." It seems pretty straightforward that the hacker intercepted TorrentSpy's e-mail (an electronics communication).

So what was Judge Florence-Marie Cooper thinking in August 2007 when she ruled in favor of the MPAA?

"Anderson did not stop or seize any of the messages that were forwarded to him," Cooper wrote in her decision. "Anderson's actions did not halt the transmission of the messages to their intended recipients. As such, under well-settled case law, as well as a reading of the statute and the ordinary meaning of the word 'intercept,' Anderson's acquisitions of the e-mails did not violate the Wiretap Act."

Just like that -- in a millisecond - Internet privacy rights have again come under serious threat. All for $15,000 and from a motion picture industry that, despite its protests to the contrary, is not seriously hurt by piracy. The film industry, it should not be forgotten, had a record box office year in 2007.